Though it was
urgently necessary that production should be increased by the
most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no
fact was better established than that excessive duration and
intensity of toil reduces production heavily instead of
increasing it, the factory laws were suspended, and men and women
recklessly over-worked until the loss of their efficiency became
too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances and warnings were met
either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the formula,
"Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed
that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost
unless we did the exact opposite of everything we had found
necessary and beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than
that. The war did not change men's minds in any such impossible
way. What really happened was that the impact of physical death
and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand,
tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from
our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in
the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most
abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has
been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet
the pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the
mud like hats in a gust of wind.
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